Jahr: 2012

My favourite quotes from the Wikipedia page on W. Edwards Deming: “[Deming] is regarded as having had more impact upon Japanese manufacturing and business than any other individual not of Japanese heritage. […] Deming questioned the company’s culture and the way its managers operated. To Ford’s surprise, Deming talked not about quality but about management.…

Alan G. Carter’s The Programmer’s Stone – Implications for Software Engineers: “The clerical worker, by subjecting the programmer to bureaucratic stress, has forced the programmer into stress modulated focussed attention, and the ability of his or her brain to hold the program that is already there is lost. Hence “evaporation”. In some organizations it’s quite…

Donald Reinertsen and Stefan Thomke at Harvard Business Review – Customers Don’t Want More Features: “Determining which features to omit is just as important as—and perhaps more important than—figuring out which ones to include. Unfortunately, many companies, in an effort to be innovative, throw in every possible bell and whistle without fully considering important factors…

Quora answers, compiled by Paul M. Jones – What are telltale signs that you’re working at a “sinking ship” company?: “You have a launch party, and no customers attend. […] You complain about how the customers „just don’t get it“ and aren’t „visionary.“”

Occupy Meeting: “Death By PowerPoint, Resurrection By Tablet is a manifesto for a new, more substantial workplace. Stop meeting after the meeting.” Quotes from the manifesto: “Research shows that individuals create best in solitude and isolation. Committees and meetings do not create. Their role is to serve as mediums of dissent and contention. Great meetings…

Gojko Adzic – How To Solve “Not Enough Time”: “Teams track velocity as story points, number of items implemented. Instead, we should be tracking value delivered. That is the real velocity. That is the real outcome. Any improvement to the software delivery process should speed up the rate with which we deliver value, not effort.”

Matthias Marschall (in 2011) – The three essentials of any agile process: “By making progress (and bottlenecks) visible, helping people focus, and pulling together as a team, everyone starts to be proud of what they’re doing. Suddenly, they want to be responsible for the whole story (not just an implementation detail). They start to take…

Searching the web for images you can actually (legally) use, for commercial or non-commercial purposes, is almost impossible: Google or Bing will show you millions of images, but have no clue under which terms you’re allowed to use them. Lots of “information silos” let professionals search for, and license, rights cleared images, from iStockphoto to…

Oliver Reichenstein – Sweep the Sleaze: “Don’t worry. These buttons will vanish. The previous wave of buttons for Delicious and Digg and Co. vanished, Facebook and Twitter and G+ might vanish or they might survive, but the buttons will vanish for sure. Or do you seriously think that in ten years we will still have…

Jeff Atwood – This Is All Your App Is: a Collection of Tiny Details: “Getting the details right is the difference between something that delights, and something customers tolerate. Your software, your product, is nothing more than a collection of tiny details. If you don’t obsess over all those details, if you think it’s OK…